News from April 2009
Ordering coffee can be difficult
April 27, 2009
“the coffee’s over there… it’s self serve”
~ cashier
Trying something new isn’t always as simple as it should be. This morning, I had a few minutes to kill so I stopped in at a new (to me) coffee shop to grab a cup to go. It’s a fairly well known establishment in town, but I had only been there once before. Not thinking that it should be any different, I started into my normal coffee purchasing routine.
“What are you brewing today?”, I said as I stepped up to the counter.
They replied, “the coffee’s over there… it’s self serve”.
The answer didn’t help me at all, but I thought I’d proceed anyway. I ordered a “this size” (pointing to one of the stacks of cups in front of me) and, since the cashier/barista didn’t hand me anything, asked if I should take a cup.
She said, “nope, cups are over there by the coffee… it’s self serve”.
It’s not that I’m opposed to serving myself or that I mind paying and then going to pour my cup of coffee. I’m open to a different process than I’m used to at my usual coffee joint, but the people working the counter at this establishment didn’t make me feel smart or help me learn what their process was. In addition, they left confusing clues about how things worked. If I get the to-go cup next to the self serve coffee, then why the big stack of cups next to the till? And why avoid answering my brew questions. Dispensing my own coffee doesn’t make my “what are you brewing?” question invalid. What if I didn’t want the dark roast that you had on tap today?
The experience reminded me of how we often deal with people in our product approach. Often a customer asks a question that we don’t expect and we give them a short, pat answer because we believe they should understand how our process works.
People are often up for doing things differently; they just need to know what to expect. Outlining your sales and customer care process, and even giving a few reasons why you do what you do, can go a long way. IKEA does a great job of this by posting information all over the store that explains why you have to assemble your own furniture, do your own delivery, and even clean up your own dishes in the cafe. By explaining that the little extra effort on my part helps to keep the cost down, I’m completely willing to take part.
Sometimes we forget to communicate our process and rationale. As an example, people might appreciate your prices, but they still expect the extras. If you explain that you’re focusing on the core needs to keep the costs down, people will appreciate it greatly.
We’ve tried really hard to let people know what to expect when having a standard website designed with lift, but I’m realizing that we need to take this approach in every area of our business. For our image portfolio product, Parade, we need to continually get better at explaining how we’re different and why. We don’t want the act of buying something so simple to be frustrating and difficult.
Tips for Handling Slow Business Periods
April 25, 2009
Here are a few ideas that might get you started.
- Get a handle on your expenses. Often when times are busy, businesses take on extra expenses and when things slow down it might be time to get out the spreadsheet and figure out what can be trimmed.
- Get better at your ‘trade’. Whatever it is you do, when it gets a bit slower, take some time to read more online tutorials, experiment with new technologies or even just practice.
- Learn something new. Maybe it’s time to build on your skill set. Both from a business and a personal point of view, it makes sense to have more skills and abilities available.
- Start social networking. Get out a meet people, go for coffee, have lunch—do whatever it takes to build your network. Social networking sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter (I am here) can also be a great way to build your network.
- Touch up or rebuild your portfolio. Contact previous customers and ask for testimonials, share your successes. Consider using a portfolio tool like the one we have built.
- Look for passive income. Can you monetize your website? Can you sell something online?
- Change your prices. You don’t have to drop your prices but you should take some time to step back and look at your pricing models. Perhaps you can offer “bundles” that could group together commonly requested services. Perhaps you can streamline some parts of your service offering to make it more attractive to new customers. Regardless of how you change your pricing, keep in mind that if the slow business period turns around, you will still have the customers that you created with these new pricing models. Be careful.
- Get motivated. See what you can do to get your business motivated. It might mean looking for ways to have fun in the office or perhaps other incentives are needed. Even if you work on your own, reward yourself for big win so you can get motivated for the next one.
Hopefully some of these suggestions are helpful.
Do you appreciate failure?
April 21, 2009
I used to teach a few classes on various aspects of web development at the University of Alberta and one of the things I would say to boost the students’ confidence was, “every mistake you make, I’ve made a dozen times.” And it’s mostly true. The number might be exaggerated in some cases but every typo, every logic flaw, every design decision that I make is based on having failed in the past.
The one thing about programming failures is that most of the time, you hit the backspace button a few times, type some different keystrokes and you’re not a failure anymore. This isn’t the case for most other businesses.
If I back the microscope out a bit and look at the business instead, I see that most web design companies are pretty good at tolerating failure. Often it means a few less dollars but because the cost of failure is relatively low, the tolerance is high. If you take on greater risk in your business, perhaps the cost is high or perhaps the tolerance is very low, how does your business handle it?
Here are a “food for thought” articles.
- http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2009/04/08/failure-essential-in-the-creative-workplace/
- http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090330.wINCfailureRisk0330/BNStory/incubator/
Ask yourself, does my company tolerate failure? Does it encourage people to take enough risks? Is it creative?
Ad Space Available
April 20, 2009
If you are interested in promoting your company/website we are now selling ad space on our Foosball field. Please comment or email for details.
101: Screen Resolution
April 20, 2009
101 is an ongoing effort to answer commonly asked questions related to the web design.
One of the most common comments we get in the design process involves screen resolution. Although most computer users understand that there are different screen sizes, many still don’t realize that there are various screen resolutions that can be set by preference.
Put simply, the resolution of a screen is the number of pixels (little colored squares) that fit on a screen. The measurement is written in two numbers: width x height. The higher the resolution, the more pixels there are on the screen, which means a higher quality display. A higher resolution will display images and typefaces more clearly and crisply.
What does it all mean to you?
The most important point to understand with resolution is that an image, video or website will display differently on one resolution than another. This makes things especially complicated for websites because the designer can’t possibly design and maintain a separate experience for every possible resolution.
In the past there were only a couple of standard resolutions to deal with, so you would commonly see a message on a splash page (welcome screen) that would tell you the best resolution to use. These days, there are many common resolutions with a very wide range of sizes.
According to Wikipedia the common resolution usage breaks down like this.
| Resolution | % of Internet Users |
| Higher than 1024×768 | 57% |
| 1024×768 | 36% |
| 800×600 | 4% |
| Lower than 800×600 | < 1% |
| Unknown | 3% |
So what do we do?
The standard approach to screen resolution is to design for the most common resolution. These days (as seen above), that resolution is 1024×768. This means that the designer will “optimize” the site to fit easily within the common resolution size. Because white space will exist to the side(s) of the design on higher resolutions, various design techniques can be implemented. A creative background can often make a layout look at home on many different resolutions (see http://wetlandsalberta.com, http://scholarshipandmore.org, http://rothandramberg.com).
The two following images show the lift site on two common screen resolutions.
The Lift site layout at 1400×900 resolution.
The Lift site layout at 1024×768 resolution.
Questions? Comments? Chime in below.
CSS print stylesheet intricacy
April 9, 2009
This caused me much frustration. So for the record, don’t ever include a title attribute on an HTML <link> element.
This may not come into play in most situations (I’ve never run into the problem before), but if the CSS file you’re linking to is for print (as opposed to screen) it may break the link and your print styles will not be rendered.
For example, this will work fine:
<link rel=“stylesheet” href=“print.css” type=“text/css” media=“print” />
but this will not:
<link title=“Print stylesheet for example.com” rel=“stylesheet”
href=“print.css” type=“text/css” media=“print” />
I don’t know why, but if you have the title attribute (which is not actually valid according to the W3C anyway) your page will not respect the rules in your print stylesheet.
I tested this in Firefox3 and Safari3 on Mac. That’s all I’ve got. Leave a comment if you’ve had any experiences similar to this.
Bugs happen.
April 7, 2009
One of the unfortunate things about being a developer is that if I do my job really well, no one outside the company will know that I exist.
On the bright side, this lets me get away with a lot – generally, I need to worry a lot less about client expectations and timelines, which means that I can focus more on getting things done than on dealing with any pesky meetings. This lack of distractions tends to result in more focused work, because I can plan my day better and I’m less distracted than your typical Micah.
Unfortunately, if I make a mistake, mine are the ones that break things – a minor bug that I accidentally introduce can suddenly take down Inflight for a few hours, or make it so that users are unable to re-order their photos(if you’re an Inflight user, don’t worry; it’ll be fixed soon).
Just after Parade launched, one of the features that we decided to add was private galleries – and I was responsible for building most of it. It was a friday afternoon just before lunch when I finished the feature, and showed it to everyone. Everyone liked it, so I decided to deploy it right then and there.
Now, if you or someone you know is a developer, chances are you know exactly what happened. For those of you who aren’t, I’ll sum it up: my lunch was delayed by half an hour, as I frantically worked at getting every photo on the site to appear again. Users photos, our photos, Roth & Ramberg’s photos – they had all disappeared.
It turned out to be a minor issue that I had missed while developing locally – but for users, it was a showstopper bug. What good is a photo site if it’s not displaying your(or anyones) photos?
These sorts of ‘showstopper’ bugs are rare, but they still spring up – and trust me, when they spring up I’m even more concerned about getting them fixed quickly than you are.
The important thing to remember when you encounter a bug is that it’s more helpful for you to send us the steps to reproduce a bug than it is for you to e-mail us and say ‘feature
‘feature
A more helpful e-mail would have as much information as you could possibly give us about how to reproduce the bug, any relevant information about your computer, and screenshots if possible – along with a brief explanation of what you expected, and what happened instead. Here’s an example of a ‘good e-mail’:
I recently noticed that re-ordering Images in Inflight doesn’t seem to work as expected. When I log into my site at domain.com and go to my ‘Homepage Slideshow’ gallery, when I click on the ‘reorder images’ link, the images don’t seem to be draggable. I have experienced this behavior in IE7, FireFox 3, and IE5(mac).
This is a helpful bug report – By following the steps that the user tells me they’ve taken, I can either reproduce the bug – or I can’t. If I can’t reproduce the bug, the question then becomes whether this is a feature that is not behaving as expected(and therefore a UI issue), or whether the bug is browser-specific.
The better the bug report, the faster I can fix the issue – so next time you’re about to e-mail me to say “feature
Do you have a bad client rate?
April 3, 2009
If you provide a service for clients, do you have a way to deal with clients that give you headaches or frustrate you? You should.
I was given a piece of business advice from a friend with quite a bit of experience in the area. He said, “never say no to work, just say how much.” I find so much value in such a short statement. The meaning here is that if you have work for a client that you don’t want to do, for whatever reason, rather than refuse the work propose a price that will satisfy you in doing the work. This could be a multiplier of your regular rate (just like overtime) or an hourly surcharge. It could be even be the cost to outsource the labor to someone else and just act as the project manager. If you’re getting paid a bit more, it’s much easier to work with a client that’s causing you stress.
If there are any manager out there reading this, you should consider applying this extra income in some way that benefits the people that have to deal with the clients directly. After all, they’re the ones that are dealing with the difficulty.
Whatever it is, you should decide on how you want to deal with difficult clients in advance of actually having to deal with them. Once you’ve identified a difficult client, anyone dealing with the money should be aware of this and all quotes or estimates for work should include the “new” rate.
As a design company, to all intents and purposes, we are experts in design. Most of the time our clients are coming to us for that expertise and to allow us to do the best job we can for them. On occasion, we get clients that seem to want to interfere with our processes and derail us. It’s not their fault—they’re just doing what they think is right. We run into difficulty when they want to assert their opinions over our expertise. When this happens, and if we can’t get them to allow us to do our jobs, we note them as difficult clients.
It’s important to know that we still want to do our best and we want to put out the best work we possibly can but when we have a difficult client, we have to make adjustments. In a lot of cases this extra charge isn’t really that much extra—it’s mainly just paying for extra communication that goes on and in some cases the “trial and error” that typically occurs when the experts can’t do their job.
At Lift, we very rarely have bad clients because we do focus so much on making sure communication is clear. However, we’re ready in case we do get one.
Chalkboard Sketches
April 2, 2009
I finally got around to transferring the images from my humble cellphone to my computer. I don’t use the camera on my phone very often (I’m kind of a photo snob) and I haven’t ever transferred the images off of my phone – so I don’t really remember taking half of them.
If you’ve even been to the Lift office you might remember seeing a chalkboard in the boardroom – it’s where we sketch out all of our brilliant ideas. What you might not realize is that, at one point, the chalkboard was itself one the those ideas! We built it from scratch and here’s the picture to prove it! This is the second coat of chalkboard paint waiting to be applied.
And below is the end result, although it looks much better in person.
The quality of these pictures is also a good example of why I don’t often use the camera on my cellphone…